Frank Carius

Author: Frank Carius
Enterprise Architect / Partner – connect on LinkedIn

Not so long ago, this was the exception. Today, it’s a fact of life in many companies. There is no way around working from home. But as many benefits as working from home has: It also presents many challenges, especially when it comes to network connectivity.

In this blog post, you will learn about the typical challenges your network faces and how Rimscout can help you effectively monitor your home office network.

Home office network connection

At least since Covid-19, the majority of employees no longer work in the traditional office, but from home or other locations outside the corporate network. The first priority is to have a secure connection. Of course, almost everyone uses a VPN to transfer encrypted data to the company’s servers. In theory, as long as the VPN is not turned off, users can sit back and go about their business – or can they?

In practice, however, connecting from the home office is anything but unproblematic. Although companies still have control over the endpoint, most companies are left out in the cold when it comes to the network. There are few exceptions where employees are provided with an Internet connection and a VPN router at home. Instead, the connection is the responsibility of the individual employee, whether it is a DSL connection with a wireless router at home, a wireless connection at a hotel, or Internet access at a colocation workstation.

Typical network challenges in the home office

Today’s home office workers have the same expectations for network functionality as their colleagues in the office.
What they tend to forget is that they are in a completely different place from a networking perspective, with different constraints.

In fact, things can go wrong and not everything is in the administrator’s hands. Some of the typical challenges include:

  • Overloaded WLAN connections
    Most workstations at home have a router with WLAN for Internet access. A patch cable is rarely installed because the workstation may be on the balcony, in the dining room, or in the basement. Other Internet applications such as a radio, streaming or smart home control are also used via WLAN. However, this flexibility and variety of use often leads to unstable connections, interference from other devices, disconnections and generally poor network performance, especially when used by other household members at the same time.

  • Lack of network management
    On the corporate network, you can use network management to evaluate all access points, fix dead spots or poor locations, and install important updates. In the home office, you usually don’t have access to your employees’ infrastructure, and even if you do, you probably don’t want to manage these subnetworks for your employees. Lack of network management makes it difficult to quickly diagnose and resolve network problems, especially when employees use different carriers, router models, and wireless configurations.

  • DSL speed and reliability
    Advertisements for home Internet connections often promise high speeds, but these usually only apply to downstream. Downstream refers to the direction of transmission in a network from the service provider to the consumer. For office use, however, both upload and download speeds are important. In addition to theoretical throughput, latency, peering, and routing are critical to a stable connection. In most cases, however, users are unable to analyze these parameters, and very few providers make this information public. This often leads to a discrepancy between advertised and actual performance, which can have a negative impact on the network.

  • VPN connection and security
    When home office and security are mentioned in the same sentence, VPN is not far behind. It is elegant to connect a client to the corporate network via a closed tunnel and strong authentication over the Internet. This approach is also the right one if the desired services are all provided on the corporate network. However, the concept is not optimal if cloud services are also to be used, as the packets then take a long detour through the company and put an additional load on the Internet access there. Incorrectly configured VPNs can also create security holes and reduce network speed.

These are just a few of the daily challenges faced by corporate IT operations in the home office that cannot be efficiently managed without the right tools.

Innovative network monitoring with Rimscout

As long as the end devices are connected to the company LAN, the network is generally not critical. However, with the home office, the transmission paths expand. Now only a short section of the LAN is “managed”, while most sections are no longer under the control of the internal IT.

Many network monitoring systems are blind to these sections because they only monitor the server room and not the end device in the home office. Rimscout focuses on the end user. The latencies to the services used are measured directly from the user’s end device via a locally installed client. In addition, information about the network environment is regularly collected to determine whether the employee is working from home or in the office.

View current network performance across multiple office locations and the home office.

Rimscout continuously performs connection tests and collects detailed information about the performance of devices and networks in real time. This enables precise analysis of the connection from the clients to the services used. The collected data is transmitted to a central portal, which facilitates troubleshooting. In addition, by comparing connection quality between different locations, providers and services, particularly poor or problematic components can be identified. In this way, global problems can be distinguished from local ones.

In this example, home office users were reporting problems with Microsoft Teams. A look at the Rimscout portal showed that all registered locations, including the data collected from home office users, confirmed problems with Microsoft Teams at the same time (shown by the red bars).
This meant that a global outage could be assumed and the home-based network could be ruled out as the source of the problem.

Summary

Working from home brings with it a number of challenges, especially in terms of the network, that affect the productivity and stability of the work environment. Rimscout offers an innovative solution to overcome these challenges. Through continuous connection analysis and centralized data evaluation, correlations can be quickly identified and problems can be solved in a sustainable manner. The result is a stable and secure network environment that enables remote employees to work as effectively as if they were in the office.

Try Rimscout in your environment.
Do you know how stable your remote workers’ network is? Try Rimscout’s full functionality for one month free of charge.